Tag Archives: WPLongForm

Havva Duran took the aubergine and sliced into the skin, deftly swishing the blade upwards at her body as thin roads of rich purple skin fell away from the flesh. Having spent my entire life following kitchen safety rule number one – don’t point a knife towards you – she wasn’t having much luck convincing me that it’s easier to slice vegetables holding them in your hand rather than on a board. She clucked her tongue and chuckled as the five participants in this cooking lesson endeavoured, with painful slowness, to copycat the zebra stripe vegetable peeling method she had demonstrated.

While I was grappling with not trying to slice my wrists open, Havva moved onto preparing the onion. I winced as she held it in her palm, making quick, deep criss-cross gashes in the flesh. “This is the Turkish way of cutting vegetables,” Tolga Duran said as he stepped behind his mother.

If I even attempted that an ambulance would have to be called within minutes.

A garlicky aroma wafted through the kitchen as the vegetables fried on the stove-top. Tolga and his wife Tuba kept a steady eye on the stirring while Havva showed us how to make a barley soup. Just outside, a clutch of chickens kept up a staccato soundtrack of satisfied clucks.

In the Cappadocia village of Ayvalı the Duran family are opening the door into the culinary world of a Turkish mama. Often hailed as one of the world’s great cuisines, the complex meze (small plates) dishes, kebaps (kebabs) and rich Ottoman court dishes of Turkey have worked themselves onto restaurant menus across the world but the simple hearty dishes that provide the very backbone of this nation’s cooking have so far been ignored. Tolga and Havva are turning around that trend offering a chance to learn those elusive recipes, full of the harvest-fresh flavours of the Anatolian plains.

“We buy our flour and barley at the market but everything else we use here is all from just outside and it’s all organic,” Tolga told me as we walked through the sprawling back garden. The entire space behind the Duran household, where three generations of the family live together, is a giant vegetable plot sprouting rows of fat green cabbages, bulbous courgettes, trailing tomato vines and shady fruit trees.

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With its surreal moonscape of twisted volcanic rock and Byzantine remnants of rock-cut churches, Cappadocia is one of Turkey’s most popular tourist destinations but Ayvalı feels a step apart from the region’s other villages. Tractors chug up the main road coming back from the fields. A squiggle of twisting cobblestone streets lined with honey hued stone houses lead down the hill to a narrow valley where the cliff face is pockmarked with abandoned pigeon cotes. Tolga used to work as a chef in a local hotel. “There weren’t any places for guests to eat out in the village so the hotel kept asking me if my mother would take groups at our house.” That was five years ago. “The first tour leader who came here convinced me that people wanted to experience proper local cooking.”

A complete family affair, Havva rules the kitchen roost, Tolga and Tuba lend a hand, and their two young boys peek around the door occasionally to check if the foreigners have managed not to cut themselves or catch the stove on fire. With the soup simmering away, we carefully split the glossy aubergines and spooned a tomato infused mixture of fried vegetables over the top to make the dish karnıyarık. After that was transferred to the oven to bake, it was time to make mantı (Turkish ravioli).

Using an oklava (Turkey’s skinny broomstick of a rolling pin) takes some getting used to. Havva made it look easy, using the weight of her flat palms to spread the mantı dough flat across the worktop, creating one even thin sheet. Our attempts afterwards were not quite so deft. Once rolled, the dough was cut into tiny squares and we gathered around to fold them into miniature parcels, stuffed full of spiced mince.

One of my fellow cookery class participants had got the hang of mantı making rather quicker than the rest of us. “I’m really glad we’re making something complicated. Most classes don’t have the patience to teach you something like this,” she said as a pile of pinched dough parcels mounted up on the worktop beside her. A self-confessed foodie, she’d been travelling for the past five months and taking cooking classes where ever she went. “This is the first one where it’s actually been in somebody’s home and felt authentic, as if we’re experiencing part of family life,” she told me.

With the soup, the vegetable starter and the mantı main out of the way it was onto dessert. Balı dolaz tatlısı is a local pudding, made from flour. When ready, this simple farmer’s dish was topped with huge golden hunks of honeycomb which oozed sticky goodness across the tops of the flour cakes. There was now nothing left to do but eat.

While we’d been busy a low table had been laid behind us. It was groaning under the weight of food. There was creamy white yoghurt drizzled with sticky dollops of pekmez (grape molasses), tangy spiced mecimek kofte (lentil balls) and slices of soft home-made cheese. We slurped up the soup, devoured the soft, smoky aubergine of the karnıyarık, cleaned our bowls of mantı, scraping up every lick of the garlicky tomato sauce it was served with, and crunched through the honeycomb sucking up the sweet honey centre.

As we left there was one last foodie surprise. As Havva hugged us goodbye, she presented us each with a bag of dried apricots. She’d made them herself of course. They tasted completely unlike shop bought apricots. These were crisp yet chewy, nearly candied in their flavour.

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Food is so much more than mere sustenance in Turkey. It is the cord that binds family life together. Here in Turkey’s rural heartland the journey from farm to table is short, picked fresh out of the ground and put on the table that night. People still plan their meals on the seasonal produce on hand. Families still work the land and get together to make the preserves and pickles to store for the long, cold Anatolian winters. Learning to cook this way is a lesson not only in the hearty rustic dishes of a land long given plaudits for its food culture, but also a lesson in eschewing the fancy TV chef techniques and expensive kitchen gizmos to instead learn old fashioned, honest cooking that comes directly from the heart.

Like this:

This could just be a story about countries deemed dangerous for women to travel to. But it’s more than that. This is a story about our perception of danger and how we’re told time and time again that the unfamiliar and the foreign are more dangerous to us than what is on our own doorstep.

We’ll get back to that shortly. First I want to tell you about a strange encounter I had in Medellin, Colombia in 2001.

After a hard couple of days travelling, I was lounging around at the backpacker hostel for the afternoon when the film ‘A Cry in the Dark’ about the famous Australian dingo-baby-stealing case came on the television (you know, the one with Meryl Streep doing that Australian accent). With nothing else planned, I sat down with the hostel staff to watch it. As the film credits rolled at the end, one of the hostel staff shook their head and quite seriously announced they would never visit Australia. ‘Dingoes steal babies! The police are bad and try to pin crimes on you! And you go to jail!’

So sitting in Medellin, once known as the most violent city on earth, and still tainted with an insalubrious reputation for gang crime during 2001, a local was telling me they would be too scared to holiday in the land of kangaroos and beach barbeques. It was pretty funny.

More seriously though, this is the type of knee-jerk reaction which the Daily Mail attempts to feed on when it splashes a story about female travel safety across its pages. They’re playing on our basic instinct of safety in familiarity and the fear of what is foreign. Note the countries they chose for the list. There’s not a so-called ‘western’ country among them. They’re all in the developing world: Africa, Asia and Latin America. There’s nothing surprising about the list – despite the article title saying so – because it’s the same tired naming and shaming that has been done copious times before to these countries by the travel media.

Despite not considering myself particularly brave, I’ve travelled extensively through nine of the countries above (just South Africa to go) and lived in both Egypt and Turkey for several years. I’d be the first to admit that travelling as a woman is not a walk in the park. It can be frustrating, angering and simply fucking exhausting at certain times. But how are the Daily Mail qualifying the countries above as the world’s most dangerous destinations for women travellers?

If you read the article you’ll see that each country on the list gets a short paragraph of scary statistics on dangers in country. Number one on the list is India which the Daily Mail qualifies for its winning position by stating that ‘gang rapes of local women and tourists have reached worrying levels in parts of the country with reports suggesting that a sexual assault is reported every twenty minutes.’

I don’t want to downplay India’s dismal statistics on sexual harassment and rape. Anyone who has seen Leslee Udwin’s documentary ‘India’s Daughter’ about the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh knows that India has a long path to walk in changing ingrained male attitudes towards women. But I wondered how some other countries, which definitely didn’t make the Daily Mail’s list, would fare if I gave them the same treatment.

So using the Daily Mail’s style this is what happens when we apply it to Great Britain:

Millions of female tourists holiday in Great Britain every year but rapes and sexual assaults of women in the country are at a sky-high level with an October 2014 report issued by the Office of National Statistics stating that 22,106 incidences of rape had been reported to police that year by June. An official crime analysis estimates that one in five women over the age of 16 has been a victim of sexual assault in England and Wales.

Drink-spiking with date-rape drugs ketamine, Rohypnol and GHB has become a serious issue at clubs and bars in recent years with a 2014 survey suggesting that one in ten Brits may have been the victim of drink-spiking. Women visiting the capital London should be particularly vigilant about their personal safety, especially while taking transport home at night. Using unlicensed minicabs is particularly dangerous; more than 10 sexual assaults are reported every month in the capital.

And now let’s apply the same treatment to the USA.

Street harassment for women continues to be a serious problem for women in the USA, particularly in large cities such as New York, as shown in the video ‘10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman‘. Rape and gender-based violence is a major issue with the latest figures from the FBI’s crime report stating a staggering 79,770 rapes reported in 2013 – which works out on average to one rape, every six minutes.

Due to lax gun control laws, there is a high incidence of gunpoint robberies and other gun crime throughout the country. Female travellers should remain vigilant at all times, particularly if using public transport and walking at night.

And now let’s stop here for a minute and consider that whopping 79,770 rape statistic because I know my jaw dropped to the ground when I read it for the first time.

Let’s make one thing clear. I’m not saying that India; Brazil; Turkey; Thailand; Egypt; Colombia; South Africa; Morocco; Mexico; and Kenya don’t have a problem with gender-based violence. I’m saying that in reality, gender-based violence is a world-wide issue, not confined to the countries above.

The Daily Mail (and plenty of other media outlets) are simply using people’s fear of the unknown when they select which countries make their grade of ‘most dangerous’ for women travellers. Otherwise why would a country like Spain – where in the popular package tourist resort of Magaluf a series of highly publicised gang-rapes and sexual assaults on tourists have taken place in recent years – not make the list? Because Spain is European and familiar, and just like us.

Over the past 20 years of my travelling life I’ve been called by various people brave, bonkers, fearless, idiotic and stupidly reckless just because of the places I’ve chosen to travel to. Yet, gender-based violence and harassment is as much a problem for women in the western world from Melbourne to Madrid and London to Los Angeles. So should we all just cower at home instead? Fuck that.

Travelling as a female is always going to have certain extra risk factors that male travellers simply don’t need to contend with or worry about but you know what, they’re the same risks and dangers women face everywhere simply by stepping out of their house. So, spare us the scaremongering. The question female travellers should be asking is not ‘which countries should I avoid to be safe’, but instead ‘why the fuck in 2015 am I still more likely than a man to be a victim of violence anywhere’.

It was mango season in Egypt. The stall-holders of Souq al-Tawfiqiyya swatted flies away from the fruit piles with colourful feather whisks while spraying jets of water onto the fruit so that the mangoes’ blush-tinged skin glistened slickly. The heat within the narrow street market was nearly unbearable despite it nearing dusk. The fecund tang of over ripe produce hung in the still air. Cairo’s summer temperatures cocooned the entire city like a blanket, smothering us into a fug of indolence and idle loitering. We shopped in slow motion; picking mangoes up, smelling them, putting them down lazily, and waddling to the next stall to feel and prod again. Even the haggling was a half-hearted show, me and the vendor sighing as we carried out the pricing-battle to keep up the appearance of caring.

We were all waiting for the dark when the ripple effect of the Nile’s cooling breeze, like some ancient form of natural Prozac, would lift us out of apathy and restore us to our senses making us sigh in relief that another day in the furnace was finished with. Then the stall-holders at Souq al-Tawfiqiyya would smile at you when you picked up their fruit rather than frown and the thin alleyway, lit up by fairy lights, would thrum with a crowd of people pushing and shoving their way through while trying to manoeuvre past motorbikes and donkeys and carts. Now it was fairly quiet and easy to navigate. As long as you didn’t mind cranky vendors and the slightly off-putting smell, it was the easiest time to come here.

“There are no women here at all,” Louisa said.
I turned around just as she raised a camera to her face and snapped a couple of photos of women buying mangoes.
“What?”
“There are no women on this street.” She checked her last shots back on the digital viewfinder and then raised her camera again. “It’s absolutely bizarre.”
The camera whirred and clicked.
“It’s an entire city without any bloody women.”
I walked the few paces back to her and yanked her camera down from her face. Then I started pointing out women.
“Look there are two there, one in the bright orange floral headscarf and the taller lady beside her with the brown headscarf. You just took a photo of them. Here, a lady has just walked in front of us. She’s practically just barged into you because we’re standing still – the one in the black abbeya. There’s another one just there, with all the plastic shopping bags. Here,” I pointed. “And here, and here, and here.”
“Oh,” she said. “I must have only been looking at the fruit sellers. Well there aren’t any female fruit sellers are there?”
“No Louisa.” I said. “Market work is typically a man’s job in the Arab world.”
She shrugged and took another photo.

I gathered my tour group together and continued the walk through the souq. Later, we’d go back to the hotel swinging a bag of perfectly ripe mangoes and when we sliced them open we’d suck out the sunshine-yellow flesh, peeling it straight off the skin so that our hands were sticky fly-traps and delicate strings of mango fibre hung from our chins. That’s what Louisa would remember from the walk through Souq al-Tawfiqiyya on the first day of her three week tour of the Middle East. I’d remember her words though.

“There are no women here at all.”

And I would wonder how the hell we all became so blind.

The second time I arrived in the Middle East it was to live. I’d been hired as a tour leader for an adventure travel company with a job based in Cairo. At the interview the tour company were vague about what destinations needed new leaders. Initially I applied hoping for India. Nobody was more surprised than me when they rung me up to ask if I’d be interested in the Middle East and I said yes. Returning to Egypt had never been the plan.

The first time I departed Egypt it was by Nuweiba’s tortuously slow ferry. The crossing took five rolling and pitching hours across the Red Sea to Aqaba in Jordan and when I went to use the toilet someone had left a shit on the floor and on top of the toilet seat. At the time I thought it was a fitting final full stop to a nation I was glad to see the back of.

I had found Egypt unfathomable. It threw contradictions at you dart-speed and I had spent much of my initial 2004 journey there ducking for cover from my own muddled perceptions. Within my first five minutes in Egypt, on the Amsaad border crossing from Libya, I had found myself in the middle of a rock-throwing fight between the Egyptian border officials and a bunch of cross-border smugglers who were trying to jump the fence. In the packed immigration shed a fight broke out between two men standing directly in front of me and I had to be pulled out of the way to safety. In Luxor a man trailed behind me as I walked down the street alternating a hopeful hissing sales pitch of ‘sex’ and ‘hash’ with every step. In Aswan a child threw a rock at me. Everywhere I went I was besieged by perfume and papyrus sellers. By the time I got to Dahab in the Sinai, I was exhausted. I sat back on the cushions beside the Red Sea and talked to other travellers, drinking bottles of vodka labelled ‘Finlandia – Product of Cairo’. We were told drinking the local spirits would make us blind but it only ever succeeded in inducing hammering headaches.

One evening a bunch of us had gone dancing and the waiters from the beach-side restaurant we spent most of our time in turned up at the bar as well. They barged onto the dance floor; shimmying up behind us and rubbing their stiff penises up against our backs. Shoving them away didn’t help. They just came back and did it again so that in the end we just gave up trying to dance. One of the guys who worked at the beach camp where we were all staying told a girl to come up to the roof terrace to look at the stars. When they got up there he dropped his pants and told her to give him a blow job. When she ran back down stairs and told us what had happened, all we could think to do was laugh because hey, we said to each other, that was just what happened in Egypt.

Six weeks later, on my first day in Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri and 22 other people were blown up by a terrorist bomb along Beirut’s corniche. That same day I wandered down to the street where it had happened. My shoes crunched on thousands of fragments of broken glass underfoot. Up above hotel curtains flapped freely out of window frames. A crowd had gathered around the small cordoned off section which the police were guarding and a group of young guys wearing skin-tight jeans and bandannas tied around their heads revved past waving the yellow Hezbollah flag. Flicking through the satellite channels on the television that night in the hostel I found that there were twenty channels of porn and at least as many channels devoted to religious readings of the Qur’an. I travelled down to Tyre and took a taxi to Al-Khiam Prison which would later be bombed by the Israelis during 2006’s July War. When I visited Hezbollah were operating it as a macabre museum, with tours led by ex-prisoners who showed you around the tiny cells and explained the torture methods that had been dished out by Israel’s proxy army the SLA when Israel had occupied this chunk of Lebanon. When the tour finished they asked you to make a donation to Hezbollah and then took you to their souvenir shop where you could purchase Hezbollah key rings and miniature Hezbollah flags.

The Middle East, I had decided right there and then, was too confusing. You had to peel back onion layers of history just to attempt to fathom a single answer, and then, when you thought you understood, something would happen that would turn it all upside down again. After a particularly hard day I crashed out in front of the hostel television to watch the international news. There was a report about a woman’s refuge centre in Egypt. The centre was battling to stay open due to a lack of women using it. This wasn’t because Egypt lacked battered wives, the reporter explained, but because the cultural shame of airing your marriage problems in public in Egypt meant that women were unlikely to use it. To highlight the problem the journalist interviewed one of the women staying there whose father had berated her for seeking shelter at the refuge. “Why are you bringing shame on the family by coming here?” He had asked. “I beat your mother every night and you don’t see her running away.”

I’d had enough. On a cold March morning with snow lightly dusting the palm trees of Sultanahmet Park in Istanbul I flew out of the region and washed my hands of the Middle East. It wasn’t a place I expected to ever see again.

But then I came back. And as I settled into life there I began to feel the region had something to teach me. Lessons that took more time than a nomadic romp around its edges could ever unfurl. A couple of years ago it could have easily been me making Louisa’s throwaway remark about not seeing any women in the souq when in fact she was surrounded by them.

We all arrive in the Middle East with a particular concept of what it is already ingrained in our minds. After all, we’ve been fed the same story over and over again until it has become the only story. Blinded by our own perceptions, we choose not to seek out any alternative narrative to our own.

The second time I arrived in Cairo, I had a feeling that I had come full circle. This mark on the map had drawn a line around me for some reason and I was caught within its curvature. The ancient Egyptians had understood the power of circles. Long before they began worshipping the great sun god Ra they had deified the tiny scarab beetle which scuttled along the desert sands. Observing these little black beetles, as they laid their larva into dung and then industriously rolled the balls across the ground, the Egyptians saw that the dung balls were circular like the sun and also like the sun they would bring forth life when the scarab beetle larva sprung forth from them. They named Kephri as god of the scarab beetle and imagined the sun too was slowly being pushed by a beetle across the sky bringing light and darkness in a circular cycle of death and rebirth. Later the cult of Ra assimilated itself into the older legends but the god Kephri lived on as the dawn incarnation of Ra merging with this new impostor. Scarab beetle effigies were placed in tombs as a reminder to the dead that only half their journey had been fulfilled and they had yet to journey full circle to resurrection in the afterlife.

On that second arrival I got a taxi from the airport and drove into the centre. Above, the sky was a sludgy smear of low hanging grey glowering over the city. The springs in the back seat of the car had long ago given up hope and when I sat down I sunk into the seat and failed to rise back up again. Pieces of sponge fought to be set free from the fake leather upholstery, rising up out of the ripped fabric in little yellow geysers of foam.

The front dashboard was covered with a candy-pink fake fur rug and had been decorated with glittering talismans to ward off accidents, or at least provide a disco atmosphere in the event of one. Stickers portraying seductive eyes, laden with kohl, stared down at me from the windscreen. Christmas tinsel snaked across the pink fur. Multiple bands of amber and cherry-red plastic prayer beads were wrapped around the gear stick. Both wing mirrors had been smashed in some previous road altercation but Ahmed the taxi driver had made up for that by installing an oversized rear view mirror which stretched three quarters of the way across the windshield. Hanging down from this, was a collection of silvery baubles and a miniature Qur’an.

Ahmed caught my eye in the mirror as I stared at it and waggled his eyebrows.
“Welcome to Egypt” He grinned. “What kind of music do you like? I like western music.”
“Really? Who do you like?”
“I like Eminem and Celine Dion.”
“Ahmed you can’t like both Eminem and Celine Dion.”
“Why not?” He turned around and the car veered lazily off to the left. The car behind that had been trying to overtake us swerved to miss us and the driver beeped his horn. Ahmed beeped back and waved him on with a dismissive flick of his thin wrist. “You don’t like Eminem and Celine Dion?” He scrabbled around the dashboard to retrieve a homemade mix tape. “My favourite songs are Stan and My Heart Will Go On,” he announced. “Very beautiful.”

The mix tape crackled into life. We wound down the windows – Ahmed had to pass the communal window winder back to me as they had all fallen off the doors – and he pumped up the volume so it blared out onto the street as we sped down the highway. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and waved his other out the window in time to the music in between drags on a cigarette. The entire car shook as we picked up more speed and Ahmed turned the volume up to maximum so we could hear it over the rattling drone of the engine. We passed a highway sign pointing the way to ‘Dwon Twon’.

A maverick seat spring dug into my thigh as I leant near the window and breathed in the sharp, acrid smell peculiar to Cairo. It’s the petrol-tinged perfume of a city where two million cars fight for space on the roads every day; the exhaust fumes mixing with the desert sand which scrapes against your skin. When I swallowed I tasted metal.

I didn’t know it then but it was the start of a love affair with the Middle East and with Egypt; a tempestuous one at times, but a love affair all the same. Surviving the first summer – the summer of mangoes and of Louisa’s comment – was the real turning point. Time seemed to stagnate in Egypt in summer. You could hear resignation in the shudders of the air conditioning units as they groaned and wheezed their way through another day when the temperatures hit 40 degrees and their water overload dripped down on you as you walked down the street. Traffic ground to a halt downtown amid a symphony of car horns. In Cairo, people looked to the past as a way of coping with the city infrastructure’s slow but steady decline into chaos.

“We were once a great nation,” my friend Aisha summed up for me as she sucked on a shisha pipe. “And now we sell papyrus to the tourists.”
She blew the smoke out through her nose and it rose in curling plumes up into the night.
“Oh well. At least we have the pyramids.”

In the evenings that summer I’d walk down the streets near my flat in Zamalek, scuffing up the scattered petal confetti from the Jacaranda trees across the dingy asphalt. A petal drift clogged the potholes and piled up at the curbs. One morning, not long after I had first moved into the flat an abandoned toilet appeared on the corner of my street. It sat there all through summer, slowly gathering a layer of dirt and grime. Enterprising passers-by began using the bowl as a make-shift rubbish bin.

What’s Egypt like to live in? A friend wrote and asked me. It’s hot, I replied. There’s a toilet bowl sitting in my street. If I lean over my balcony on tip-toe I can see the Nile.

When the light began to fade I’d stand out on the flat’s balcony and listen to the local mosque’s microphone click on with a hiss of static and a muffled cough before the muezzin began the song of faith. I’d gather my washing in, dried stiffly in the crisp sun and breathe in the Cairo freshly laundered smell of diesel, desert, and faint whiff of laundry powder. Afterwards, I’d sit out there on the creaky chair as the neighbouring buildings became silhouettes under the eerie yellow tinge of the street lamps and wonder if I’d ever understand this country.

Five years later when I finally left Cairo a friend would muse that people who were attracted to the Middle East were attracted in some way to conflict. But I couldn’t agree with that analogy. Because the Middle East wasn’t just the conflict and chaos that clogged up the news channels to me any more. And it wasn’t the macho world where women were kept cowed at home that Louisa had assumed. It was a place, just like any other, full of different stories and the wonder of every day surprises. Egypt was an unfathomable mystery with an ancient stillness that resonated at the most unlikely moments and I would never completely unravel it. And that was ok because life didn’t run on straight linear lines here. It bent and wobbled. It curved. Like a circle.

And I’d remember when Ahmed the taxi driver had dropped me off in downtown Cairo at the end of the first day of my second arrival in Egypt. It had started to rain; a steady drizzle which turned the sidewalk dust to oozing mud. Egyptians ran between shops with newspapers held high over their heads to protect them from getting wet and tried to avoid the growing litany of puddles which were slowly filling the pavement potholes. He retrieved my pack from the boot and handed it to me. I paid him and said goodbye but just as I was starting to walk away he yelled for me to stop. When I turned around he was scrabbling around amid the pink furry dashboard.

“Here!” He said with a smile and put a little stone into my palm. “Ahlan wa Sahlan. Ahlan wa Sahlan Misr.”
Hello and welcome to Egypt.

“If I see one more person sitting on the terrace with their eyes glued to their bloody iPhone instead of our amazing view, I’ll throw their iPhone off the terrace.”

She’s written this on Facebook – kind of ironic when complaining about technology – but she has a point.

Like many over-35s, I remember an era of travelling when laptops were still too expensive, and heavy, to lug around in a backpack and if you wanted to contact home you used a public phone box. On my first extended backpacking trip I didn’t even know what the internet was. Even by the time email had been integrated into my travel experience, using it required the patience of a saint to search out the one internet cafe in town with a decent dial-up connection and then the ability to type fast enough to send a message before the next power-cut sharply switched the clunky computer screens back to black.

Surrounded by younger travellers in a hostel recently I came face-to-face with a new style of travelling. The young guy beside me leaned over his tablet-screen chatting to friends back home. A girl with a notebook computer the size of a wallet scrolled through TripAdvisor restaurant reviews. Across the room, a couple slouched into chairs opposite each other with eyes glued to their smartphones. They reminded me of an elderly married couple who used to be regulars at a bar I once worked in. Every night they would come into the bar together, order two pints, and then sit in silence facing each other across the scratched veneer of the table while drinking their beer. As if the long years of living together had sucked their conversation dry. There must have been nine travellers in that room but you could have heard a pin drop. The clacketty-clack of keyboard typing was only finally broken by the lone voice of a head-phoned British boy on Skype talking to his mother.

“I’m back in the hostel…Yeah did you see the photos I put up on Facebook? Can you put some more money in my bank account? I’m running out. Don’t forget to say hi to Dad.”

This new tech-heavy era of gadgetry has fundamentally shifted how we travel but I can’t help feeling ambivalence about the convenience it now provides us. If you know what the phrase Poste Restante¹ means, ever made three precious mix-tapes² to keep you going on the road, and once lugged wads of travellers’ cheques³ around your waist in a money belt, this brave new world of high-tech travel may stir the same mix of fascination and unease in you as well.

This is a travel world of tangled cords and chargers in your backpack and never enough power sockets in your hotel room. A travelling life where you’re no longer forced to read that one rubbish crime novel left on the shelf of the hotel book-exchange because your favourite books, music, film and TV programs can follow you wherever you go. Perhaps more significant to this shift in how we now travel is it’s also a world where family and friends can keep tabs on you, wherever you are, at all times.

It’s kind of like you never left home.

New technology has always played its role in changing and moulding our experiences across the years and this isn’t meant as a diatribe against the modern conveniences of travel. Neither is it a starry-eyed remembrance of the ‘good-old-days’ that never were. I don’t want to sound like a backpacker version of Monty Python’s famous ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ skit:

Backpacker one, “Eh, in my day we had to carry rolls of film around with us if we wanted to take a photo and we only had a guidebook to help with planning.”Backpacker two, “Luxury! We didn’t even have cameras. We had to sketch pictures if we wanted memories of our trip and the only information we got when arriving in a new town was from a one-eyed mute at the train station.”Backpacker three, “You were lucky to have a one-eyed mute. We got up each morning and chiselled each landscape into a stone tablet that we then had to lug around in our backpacks and the only travel tips we got came from a donkey tethered in the bazaar.”Backpacker four, “And you try and tell the young people of today that and they won’t believe you.”

But I do worry if our whole sense of wonder and discovery – the sheer joy of being somewhere completely different and not knowing what the hell comes next – is being crushed by the very technology that now makes our travel lives easier.

It’s harder to get properly lost when your smartphone’s Google Maps app can lead you directly to the main sights. It’s more difficult to feel that excited, but slightly bewildered, sense of being very far away and disconnected from normal life when Facebook and Skype allow instant access to your world back home.

And if we’re so intent on bringing home along with us on this ride into the unknown, are we simply relegating the act of travel to a list of sights we can pose ourselves in front of to prove we’ve been?

In Pico Iyer’s 1988 travel masterpiece ‘Video Night in Kathmandu’ he writes “Abroad, we are not ourselves; and as the normal and the novel are transposed, the very things we might shun at home are touched with the glamour of the exotic.”

But if we deny ourselves the pleasure of flinging off our normal home existence in the first place – remain so thoroughly plugged into the world we left behind – we’ll never give ourselves that opportunity to experience the exhilarating, befuddled brilliance that happens when the unfamiliar smacks us in the face. The serendipitous chance encounters and astounding fuck ups we can make when we’re left to flounder and find our way by ourselves out on the road. The sensory overload of India doesn’t have quite the same overwhelming and visceral sense of awe when you can finish the day in your hotel room watching Homeland on your laptop and scrolling through your Facebook news feed to find out Uncle Mike’s going back to the gym this week and your best friend Claire is cooking spaghetti for tea.

I’m not suggesting we should all strike out on the road like Rimbaud; thoroughly doing a disappearing act on our past life to reinvent ourselves anew. But just to switch off from the chattering drone coming out of ‘back there’ for at least a little while. To give ourselves the opportunity and space to become a part of these new landscapes we’re travelling in and capture more than just photos to post on our blog and Facebook page.

By venturing out from normalcy – shrugging off the ropes of everyday chores and career – we’re already allowing ourselves the first step towards experiencing something new. But by taking that further, bigger – scarier – step in opening ourselves up to a time-out from all we know at home, to be fully connected to where we are right now, that experience could become something incredible, something insane, even something profound.

So lower your camera from your face for awhile and just sit and survey the scene. Go get lost in the traffic-jammed chaos of the city streets and wander aimlessly without a map. If on these wanderings you walk past a restaurant that’s packed with locals go in and eat a meal, even if that place is not recommended by 700 other travellers on TripAdvisor. Stop. Checking. Facebook. Every five minutes. And for God’s sake if you go to my friend’s hotel can you please put down your smartphone for a second and appreciate the view.

It’s when we immerse ourselves fully in the moments along the way that you realise why you left the humdrum roundabout of home behind; the sheer, undiluted thrill of being unmoored from life. Cast adrift into a world unknown and full of possibility. There’s not an app for that. Yet.

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¹An archaic form of receiving correspondence from your loved ones when you had no permanent address. Using paper and a pen, people would write a letter and then mail it to a post office address you had given to them in the hope that you would, at some stage of your travels, be passing near that post office. The post office, if it did indeed receive the letter that had been posted, would then hold it for you for two months. If the happy coincidence of you passing by that same post office occurred in the same time frame of the letter being held there you were able to collect it and receive news from home. Please Note, often this didn’t actually work out.

²A compilation of your favourite songs copied onto a blank cassette tape and played on a portable stereo known as a walkman. Mix-tapes provided a solution to the impracticalities of trying to carry your entire collection of music cassettes around with you in a backpack. Sadly the act of repetitively hearing the same 20-odd songs over and over again also usually caused any love or sentimental value held for said songs to disintegrate completely long before the time you got home.

³An extremely popular form of safely carrying your travel funds before international-linked ATMs became common place. Travellers exchanged hard cash for travellers’ cheques which could then be exchanged for money in the local currency at banks and money-exchange offices throughout the world. The main benefit being that if lost or stolen, the cheque-issuing company would give a full refund if provided with the original purchasing slip. Unfortunately most banks in more far-flung countries demanded that you show them the original purchasing slip while you were exchanging cheques. Thus meaning that many travellers kept their purchasing slip and cheques together for convenience annulling any possibility of claiming a refund if they were indeed robbed.

Like this:

After night has fallen, the sacred fish ponds of Şanlıurfa are smooth black mirrors reflecting the backlit Ottoman arches of Rızvaniye Mosque. The effect is only distorted by the occasional ripple trembling across the surface as one of the fat silky carp who inhabit the pond patrol the depths below. During the day, these pampered pets of the city gorge themselves on offerings from visiting pilgrims. Their wide, ugly mouths rise to the edge of the pool, in a wrestling match of belly-flopping bodies, as an all-you-can-eat buffet of fish pellets rain down onto the water. To believers, the carp here aren’t any old fish. These are the lumps of coal from the funerary pyre King Nimrod built in an attempt to kill the Prophet Abraham. Miraculously transformed by God into fish, as the fire was turned into water, they spend their lives as divine beasts revered by all.

Turkey’s southeast Anatolia region is a place alive with sacred myth and legend and the ancient city of Şanlıurfa is the birthplace of monotheism’s most important story. Traditionally regarded as the biblical town of Ur (a title also contended by the Tell al-Muqayyar ruins in Iraq), this is where many Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that the Prophet Abraham was born and where he struck the first blow for monotheism’s future by challenging the pagan beliefs of King Nimrod and his subjects.

Earlier that day Ömer Tanık had explained how the city’s reverence among pilgrims had, over the years, fostered an ingrained philosophy of hospitality among the locals here. “We didn’t look at the people who came here as paying guests,” he said. “Before there were hotels in Şanlıurfa, people would approach visitors at the fish ponds to come stay in their houses for the night.” Today the spirit of this hospitality lives on in the surrounding hinterland.

We drove out of the city, passing the sprawl of concrete-cube apartment buildings on the suburban outskirts, into a rolling, raw countryside of rock-pitted plateau. Turning off the main highway, the road was blocked by fat-tailed Anatolian sheep idly waddling across the tarmac. The tiny Kurdish village of Yuvacalı would look like any other rural hamlet in eastern Turkey except for the pimple-like protrusion of the hill it is built around, poking dramatically out of the land. “It’s a settlement mound,” Ömer’s wife, Alison told me. “A man-made hill, produced by layer upon layer of civilisation settling here causing the hill to rise up as they built directly on top of each other.”

In 2009 Ömer and Alison pioneered a tourism endeavour here which offers travellers an experience of rural Anatolian life in village homestay accommodation. The initial experiment began in Ömer’s birthplace, Yuvacalı, but has now spread to other villages in the area. In 2011 the Tanıks joined up with the Abraham Path Initiative to create a trekking route through southeast Anatolia connected by these homestays. Encompassing the ancient villages of this region, walking this trail is a journey into a corner of Turkey long ignored by tourism. It is also a glimpse into a culture of natural hospitality which is rarely seen in modern-day life.

Yuvacalı smells of freshly ploughed earth and livestock. Its squat one-storey buildings are a mix of recent concrete box additions and much older mud-brick dwellings with walls that slouch and sag into the land. Pero Salva’s front yard was a hive of activity as we pulled up. Chickens perched on the crooked wooden fence and berated our noisy arrival. Sheep bleated somewhere nearby. I was ushered inside to the reception room where the walls were painted the same cheery lilac colour that many Kurds have adopted as a uniform shade for their headscarves. Pero’s husband Halil poured strong tea into tiny tulip-shaped glasses as we sat on the floor.

Typical of many of the Kurdish settlements in this area, Yuvacalı’s villagers survive mostly on subsistence farming. When Alison and Ömer first moved here from Istanbul, they did a door-to-door poll of villagers to find out what the major problems were and how they could help. “Among adults here there is 50% illiteracy,” Alison told me, “and only half are fluent in Turkish. Their native Kurdish dialects are the language spoken at home.” This of course has a knock-on effect with the younger generation, who then don’t learn Turkish until they enter the school system and are, by then, struggling to catch up with their peers.

They discovered that in every single village household the income was under US$1 per day, per person. Tourism could help to combat this poverty chain. “The two homestays in the village provide employment for eight families,” Alison said. In a place as rural, and conservative, as Yuvacalı though, bringing tourism into the mix can be a difficult balance to get right. “We don’t want to destroy the fabric of the village,” she said. Kurdish culture is conservative but not particularly because of Islam. Their values stem from living in close proximity to each other. “It comes from lots and lots of people occupying a very small space, trying to get on and being respectful of that fact.” She explained. Guests at the homestays are expected to be modestly dressed. Women visitors must wear an ankle-length skirt, men must wear long trousers, and alcohol is not allowed.

Kurds make up the largest minority in Turkey, numbering about 14 million, and live mainly in the southeast of the country. It was only after the regional upheavals of the early 20th century that Yuvacalı became a solely Kurdish village though. Before then local oral tradition tells of a vibrant community of Kurds, Armenians, and Jews all living here together. The settlement mound points back to an even earlier history. Today Yuvacalı may seem like a remote, inconsequential outpost, but in the empire-building days of early civilisation it was positioned directly on an important crossroads.

This entire region of southeast Anatolia was the crux of territorial conflicts and commerce, between Hittites, Assyrians, Achaemenid Persians and Seleucid Greeks, Romans and Sassanians, and, later on, Byzantines, Arab conquerors, Crusaders, and Ottomans. Yuvacalı’s settlement mound is thought to be at least 10,000 years old. Although the mound has never been excavated, surface finds of cuneiform tablets, pieces of flint and mosaic have indicated to visiting archaeologists that the mound here dates back to at least the 8th millennium BC. It is entirely plausible it could be a lot older.

Ömer drove me out to the village of Soǧmatar which sits in a dip between two hills. The houses were half built from stone taken from ancient shrines and sprouted satellite dishes out of flat metal roofs held down by pieces of brick. We scrambled up the flank of one of the hills just as the sun burst down upon the landscape silhouetting a shepherd on horseback upon the opposite hill, surrounded by his flock. The rock surface of the peak was covered in elaborate Assyrian script.

We hiked over to the opposite peak where a half collapsed circular temple dedicated to Venus was a reminder of the religion of celestial worship common in the area before the Prophet Abraham. Today Soǧmatar is made up mostly of Arab nomads who settled here in the 1980s but it was once an important cult sacrifice centre where every moment of life was directed by the movements of the sky. Although an official tourist signpost, at the entrance to the village, briefly explains Soǧmatar’s significance this ancient site, like most in this region, is half-forgotten and completely bypassed by normal tourism. A donkey tethered to a tree kept up a constant mournful braying. A dank, musty cave on the edge of the settlement still hosted the clear outlines of life-sized idols in eroded niches, which had been abandoned as monotheism crept over the land.

This hike formed a small section of the new Turkish Abraham Path which, when walked fully, is a 170km, 10-day trek through this region. The Abraham Path itself is a bold venture to blaze an interconnecting series of walking trails throughout the Middle East which trace the journey of the Prophet Abraham from Turkey, south to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. But this trek is not supposed to simply be a religious pilgrimage. It’s also a journey into our beginnings. In human history, this part of modern-day Turkey is not only the birthplace of monotheism but also the ground where we took our first shaky toddler steps to civilisation. Locked between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, this stretch of land makes up the northwest region of ancient Mesopotamia. It was across this countryside that mankind first discarded the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for settlement.

The conversion of belief systems from a sky-worshipping culture to the belief in one god was a slow process that is said to have begun with Abraham on his journey from Ur. Instead of attempting to exactly mirror a journey that both believers and non-believers could spend forever debating the reality of; today’s Abraham Path instead attempts to forge a trail highlighting the different stages of our common humanity. “It’s not a political path. It’s not a religious path. It’s a cultural path, fundamentally a human path.” William Ury, one of the founders of the Abraham Path, told me. Passing through ancient, half-forgotten temple sites and worship centres such as Soǧmatar offers walkers a chance to connect not only with modern-day village life, but also with the greater history of our own joint humanity.

Back in Yuvacalı, Pero rolled a long plastic tablecloth across the floor and all the family pitched in to begin bringing dishes out of the kitchen. Creamy lentil soup, bright salads of ruby tomatoes and crispy lettuce, smoky sliced aubergines charred to melt-in-your-mouth perfection, trays of thick, comforting home-cut chips, and tiny bowls of tarty cacık (Turkish yoghurt and cucumber salad), and ısot spread (the Urfa region’s famous hot pepper), which glowered a danger-inducing shade of dark red, all appeared in front of me.

Hospitality has always been the thread that binds the cultures of the Middle East together. To be a guest in this part of the world is to be honoured with the best your host can provide, from the copious cycle of cups of tea which punctuates the beginning and end of any visit, to the feast of local produce laid out as a meal when visitors arrive; it is part of a traditional system still very much alive today.

It’s a belief that has its roots in a nomadic past when hospitality was an essential component of survival. It was with this very hospitality that the journey of Abraham which is told in the holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was able to be accomplished. In the West Abraham is remembered chiefly for the Old Testament story of his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of his loyalty to his god (in Islam, the child in the story is Ishmael) and this earlier story of generosity has faded from general knowledge.

Pero and Hilal don’t need any reminding. For them hospitality is a natural part of their culture; as much a part of life as the seasonal agriculture chores which define so much of rural life in this part of the world. By incorporating village stays into the Abraham Path visitors have the opportunity to experience a culture where welcome truly does mean welcome and hasn’t been reduced in meaning by over-tourism. To be a visitor here, if not as rare as it once was, is still an exciting occasion. “This is an ancient path of kindness,” William Ury said. Walking along this trail “is a way of reconnecting the human family footstep by footstep and remembering our collective past.”

In 2008 I led a one-off tour that started in Cairo and then stretched west across North Africa, meandering all the way to Casablanca in Morocco. Back on a minibus, after an exhausting wait on Egypt’s Sallum border post into Libya, I overheard my elderly tour passenger crow to her husband, “number 66 and another one off the bucket list.”

“Hey Jess,” her husband shouted. “This is our 66th country. How many countries have you been to?”

Here’s a secret.

I don’t have a bucket list.

There. I’ve said it. I have committed the sin of the modern day traveller. I don’t have a top 50 things to do before I die or even a top 20 places to see before I turn 40. When I was 20 I didn’t have a top 100 destinations to tick off a list before I turned 30 either. And when I did turn 30 I wasn’t exactly sure how many countries or bucket-listy places I’d actually been to.

Not long after that tour finished, a friend got me to write down all the countries I’d visited to see who came out on top. After presenting him with the list he pointed out that despite the fact we were living in Cairo and my job had me constantly travelling across the Middle East and North Africa I had managed to forget to write down every single North African and Middle Eastern country, including the one I lived in. I guess I wasn’t made for tick box tourism.

The way my passenger couple had gloated that they’d now been to 66 countries when we’d only been in number 66 for a total of five minutes sums up the bucket list problem to me. It reduces the very act of travelling to a simple list of must-sees and must-dos that we can later brag about. Of course I want to see a country’s most famed monuments and attractions (and you can read more about my attitude towards the travel-snobs who avoid the major sites here) but it always seems to me that it’s the things in between all those must-sees that provide the best and most memorable travel experiences.

In 2004 I went to Libya for the first time (sans passengers) and yes, the grand Roman ruins of Leptis Magna blew me away and I thought the winding lanes of the Sahara Caravan city of Ghadarmes was one of the most enchanting place I’d ever seen but they are not the things that first spring to mind when someone asks me about Libya.

Instead I usually tell them about the shopkeeper in Khoms (the town beside the ruined Roman city) who was so gobsmacked at seeing an independent traveller that he wouldn’t let me pay for my groceries. Or I tell them about the oil engineer in Tobruq who bumped into me on the street and took the day off work to give me a private tour of the WWII cemeteries. His tour culminated in a tea drinking session with Tobruq’s Minister for Tourism who earnestly asked me how they could attract more travellers to town and then, jangling a set of keys before me, opened up Rommel’s operation bunker just for me. I tell them about being held in the Ghadarmes police station for hours because they knew I wasn’t supposed to be here (independent travel was illegal in Libya at this time) but they didn’t know what to do with me (they decided ignoring the issue was the best option and let me go). And I tell them about bizarre bus trips, about hitching rides in dodgy minibuses with even dodgier drivers, and getting lost everywhere because the guidebook maps were so out of date none of them made sense. Mostly though the things I remember from that trip are the people and you can’t put people on a bucket list.

It’s not that I think bucket lists are wrong. Just sometimes they seem to narrow our perspective so we don’t see the bigger picture. If we’re so busy concentrating on ticking off the next country or getting to the next star attraction we tend to miss what’s going on right in front of our noses and it’s sometimes these things that end up being the most amazingly memorable parts to a trip.

On that same Cairo to Casablanca trip in 2008 we were held up for four hours on the Tunisia/Algeria border. By the time everyone was stamped through the Tunisian side the group were a bedraggled and tired mess who just wanted to get to a hotel with a clean-ish toilet. We entered the no-man’s land between Tunisia and Algeria (my passengers’ no 68) under one of those tour group black clouds that threaten to turn into a tour leader nightmare of in-group bickering. The no-man’s land between the frontier posts stretched on in a desolate plain of dirty desert sand for four kilometres up to the shack that served as Algeria’s immigration building. I had no idea about transport here and guessed we were going to have to walk. And then, out of the desert nothingness in the distance a plume of sand rose in the air. We watched and waited as the sound of the thrumping engine got closer until Muhammad pulled up beside us in his car and threw open the passenger door which then theatrically fell off the car body completely to land in the sand beside our feet.

I squeezed people and luggage into the car. Muhammad threw open the bonnet and fixed something with a rubber band. He pushed me into the passenger seat and handed me the door to hang on to. We broke down three times on the short trip between the border posts making what should have been a five minute drive into a half hour circus which starred a hammer, a piece of rope and a copious number of rubber bands (which I began to have a whole new respect for afterwards). In a cloud of dust we arrived in front of Algerian immigration. As we climbed out, the car gave an audible sigh and something exploded in the engine. We entered Algeria laughing hysterically all signs of grumpiness gone.

You can’t put Muhammad and his border transport on a bucket list. It’s just one of those odd moments that can occur on a journey and make you love travelling even more. While bucket lists would have us condense travel to a simple series of tick box sights, it’s moments like these that remind us that travel is more than a wish list of things we must see. It’s also about the bonkers shit that happens along the way. So much of modern life is buried under lists with career goals and five year plans and achievements we should aim for. Let’s not spoil our travel time the same way.

I called them The John Travoltas. The skinny boys with greased down and perfectly centre-parted hair, dressed in hip-hugging flares and carefully tucked-in, ironed polyester wide-lapelled shirts. They were always hanging around the guesthouse reception and knocking on my door.

“Jas-see-car, you come motorbike ride?”

“Jas-see-car, come drink whiskey with me.”

“Jas-see-car, why you no liking us?”

“Jas-see-car, you making me ca-razy not talking to me!”

I’d come to Khajuraho to see its temples, famously adorned with graphic sexual depictions. But if the local boys had it their way I’d be starring in their own epic Bollywood Kama Sutra blockbuster before I left.

On the guesthouse rooftop I watched the daylight fade and the weak yellow illumination of the street lamps stamp their flickering glow across the alleyway below. I smelled him before I heard him. The cheap cologne radiated off his pores in a fruity chemical fug. He propped himself up next to me on the cement wall and invited me to a party. “A very merry party,” he explained. “Where, Jas-see-car, we will dance and dance until you are falling in love with me.” Then he launched himself off the wall and shimmied across the rooftop like a reed-thin Fred Astaire who, denied a dame, had developed a major hip-thrusting tick.

The light bulb in my room flickered and died just after 10pm as I was reading in bed. I scrambled for the candle and matches in my pack, cursing under my breath when I stubbed my toe on the edge of the bed frame. Just as I lit the candle there was a knock at the door. “Jas-see-car,” a sing-song voice said softly. “Maybe you are no liking the dark and need some company?”

Khajuraho was the first capital and then the cultural base of the Chandela Rajput Dynasty who ruled over a large swath of central India between the 10th and 12th centuries. Under the rule of King Dhangdev, King Gand and then King Vidyadhar, the town became a flourishing centre of Chandela artistry. Its ornately-decorated temple architecture was its crowning glory.

India has no shortage of temples to visit but Khajuraho’s are something special. Carved into every inch of temple exterior are thousands of exquisitely detailed scenes. Gods, Goddesses, musicians and maidens are all preserved, finely crafted, into stone. What have captured visitors’ imaginations though are the many facade scenes which depict sexual acts.

I stood craning my head upwards at the vast temple walls, staring at the open-air gallery of Medieval pornography. A local tour guide marched past jabbing his walking stick towards the temple. Following behind, was a straggling group of silver-haired tourists, flabby-skinned white knees poking out below billowing walking shorts, laden down with guidebooks and cameras. He turned towards them and raised the walking stick up into the air to rally his troops yelling “This way everybody, for the bestiality scenes.” The group quickened their pace to a shuffle. A few starchy-perm haired ladies tittered behind their hands.

When the British engineer T.S Burt thrashed through the jungle here in 1838, led to the Khajuraho temple complex by his local guides, he was scandalised by the artistic endeavours of the Chandela kings. In a typical display of buttoned-up Victorian hubris he vented his feelings about the discovery in the Journal of the Asiatic Society.

“I found in the ruins of Khajrao seven large diwallas, or Hindoo temples, most beautifully and exquisitely carved as to workmanship, but the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow rather warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing; indeed, some of the sculptures here were extremely indecent and offensive…”

Archaeologist Alexander Cunningham brought the Khajuraho temple complex to the attention of the wider world after his survey of the complex carried out between 1852 and 1885. Intrepid Victorian travellers then purposely set off to see the temples with the intention to be outraged and titillated by the Chandela sculptures.

Not much seems to have changed in our view of the sexual content upon the temple walls. A male traveller would later confide to me that when visiting he’d kept looking over his shoulder, afraid to be caught staring too long at the displays of sexual antics. He explained he had felt like a teenager sneaking a furtive peek at his dad’s Playboy collection.

Nobody knows why the artisans here chose to create such a mind-boggling array of erotica. On the exterior of Khandariya-Mahadev Temple lustful groupings of wanton women are entangled with sensuous men in an orgy of positions. Known as mithuna, these scenes of love-making human couples were thought to ward off evil but scholars have been unable to answer why so many were portrayed. The sexual subject matter of the temple carvings has been the stimulus for many theories. One of the more plausible is that as the whole menagerie of daily life has been portrayed on the temple walls, sex, which leads to the creation of life itself, should be celebrated as well. Whatever the Chandela architects’ reasoning, these are beautifully shaped scenes chiselled into stone with extraordinary skill, and it was all accomplished over a 100 year period of dazzling creativity that ended in AD 1050.

A soundtrack of birdsong and the soft staccato put-put of ceaseless water spray hoses followed me as I strolled between the temples. The western temple complex was a tranquil, green bubble complete with preening peacocks. Lush, manicured gardens were tended by a squadron of sweepers and grass cutters. On exiting, I was tipped back out onto the drab, dusty streets of reality.

Touts besieged me as I wandered by their shops, shoving cheap plastic trinkets and ratty-edged Kama Sutra postcards under my nose. I headed back to the guesthouse where the John Travolta disciples were lounging around the lobby blasting Hindi Pop from the stereo. The rooms fizzed with unspent teenage energy. “Jas-see-car!” They yelled. “Now you are here we can dance.” A boy proudly showing off the first fluff of a moustache on his upper lip wiggled his way across the scuffed linoleum floor towards me wobbling his eyebrows and head up and down simultaneously. “Jas-see-car! Beautiful Jas-see-car!” The guy behind the reception desk cried while clapping his hands to the beat.

I escaped back outside and wandered out of town along the quiet back lanes. Sedate old lady cows joined me on their afternoon stroll. Two children whizzed by on an ancient bicycle, trilling the bike’s old fashioned bell as they passed. At the Jain temple enclosure the vivid sculptures decorating the Parsvanath Temple depicted snapshots of life’s mundane little moments yet still seemed endowed with a scent of sensuality. A young girl removed a thorn from her foot in one scene. Another hour-glassed ancient babe applied her kohl makeup. Big breasted and nubile apsara (female nymph figures of Buddhist and Hindu mythology) danced across the temple facade and wrapped their arms protectively around strong warrior men, looking longingly into their eyes. The long-gone artisans and inhabitants of Khajuraho seemed as obsessed with romance as my modern-day John Travolta wannabes.

As I paid my room bill that evening the guesthouse gang surrounded me in a circle at the reception table sporting pouting lips and slapstick jilted-lover looks. When I handed over the money, one rolled his eyes and fell back on the old sagging sofa stabbing at his chest with an imaginary dagger in his hand while plumes of dust rose up from the chair.

The parrots were the only other things awake when I left the next morning. Their squawking cacophony accompanied me as I crept out of the guesthouse, winding my way over the snoring bodies of John Travoltas wrapped up in blankets on the reception floor. On the alley corner I woke up a rickshaw driver snoozing in his cab and set off for the bus station. As we passed by the western enclosure the soft buttery-yellow sandstone of the temples seemed to glow in the early morning light.

I was about to board the bus when he turned up. One of the John Travoltas riding a battered motorbike came screeching to a halt right beside the bus door. “Jas-see-car!” he said. “You didn’t say goodbye.” Leaning on the bus, we smoked a cigarette together until the other passengers had all boarded and the bus driver beckoned me inside. When I got to my seat, I pushed open the window and waved. Sitting on his bike, with his hair still ruffled from sleep and not yet fought into that slick centre-part, he looked like an abandoned child.

As the engine rumbled into action he kicked the bike up to the side of the bus under my window and grabbed at his shirt with his fist. “Jas-see-car, my heart is being brokens into many little pieces.” I rolled my eyes and laughed as we rolled out of Khajuraho bus station and onto the road. In this town of ancient tantric temples, the modern day Romeos weren’t having much luck.

Like this:

I could only see his eyes but I knew Muhammad was smiling. The crinkled creases at the corners of his eyes gave him away. He’d just finished telling me the legend behind the origins of the cheche – the six-metre long turban that Muhammad, like the majority of Tuareg men, wore wrapped mummy-style around his head. The story tells of an Arab raiding party who attacked a Tuareg village where the men had all left to go hunting. Believing they’d struck an easy target, crowing about an easy victory even before they advanced, the Arabs were dumbfounded when the Tuareg women fought back. Unprepared for a full scale battle the Arabs were forced to abandon their raid and flee. Afterwards, licking their wounds, they began to tell a tale about the warrior women of the Tuareg whose men covered their faces in shame at their women’s strength.

“If this story is true”, Muhammad said. “Who do you think should be ashamed? We Tuareg would have been proud to have such fierce women”.

Surrounded by a rippling sea of sand dunes, I breathed in the hot dust whipped up from the 4WD’s wheels. Faced with the harsh reality of the Tuareg’s homeland it’s easy to see the more prosaic reasons why the cheche became part of their traditional costume. My mouth felt like I’d been chewing gravel. My eyes stung from grit. Sweat dripped down my forehead from the congealed mass of my fringe. ‘Eating dust’ is not a catchphrase here. It’s the reality of day-to-day existence in Algeria’s southern Sahara. The cheche provides one of the most effective tools of escaping the worst of what this environment throws at you.

This is Tuareg territory. In the desert outpost of Djanet, where the sugar cube buildings slouched under the glaring sun, they glided down the dusty main drag with the slow, sinuous strides which only those born in hot climates ever master. They wore shiny emperor robes of emerald green, ruby red and Picasso blue, and sat under shop veranda shades drinking endless cups of tea. A proudly independent desert people, the Tuareg once controlled the caravans through the vast depths of the Sahara; trading in ivory, salt and slaves. This profitable business collapsed in the 20th century as the slave trade died out and the advent of the vehicle forged its way into modern life. Still capitalising on their reputation as gurus of the desert lands, the Tuareg trade in tourism these days.

Muhammad and I were following one of the Tuareg’s ancient trading routes, heading for the barren Hoggar Mountain Range. From Djanet we had veered off the bitumen and into the never-never of sand. In a beat-up jalopy of a 4WD, festooned with clinking jerry-cans, supply boxes and the mandatory guerba (a traditional water carrier made out of goat-hide), all swinging off the car frame like a survivalist’s fantasy Christmas tree, we sped across the Erg Admar’s endless yellow waves. In the distance where the land was supposed to meet the sky the horizon blurred into a silvery shimmer. When we stopped the soft soles of my feet were scorched by the griddle-hot ground. Except for our own chatter the only sound was that of the wind swooping over the crests of the dunes, re-sculpting them grain by grain.

Following the trail of an oed (a dried-up river bed), we drove west to a plateau speckled with sparse scrub. Among this pitiful landscape of dirt and dust the tiny Tuareg settlement of Tadent eked out a living as herders and trinket-touts. The air was thick with the smell of dung and campfire smoke. A skinny goat, tethered to a tree, bleated out a sad whine as I got out of the car. Village women approached me silently in flowing puffed-sleeved rainbow gowns of lipstick-pink and lime green flowers looking like bright, sparkly peacocks strutting through a tawny beige world. This was the last settlement stop for miles. Afterwards we veered off the oed and began the traverse higher into the Tassili du Hoggar.

A Dali-esque scene of bizarre mushroom shaped rocks and giant’s marbles lay scattered across a plain of orange sand. It was a stone forest, seeded by volcanic eruption and moulded by millennia of wind. We stopped at the age-old traveller resting places of Youfihakit and Tintaraben. Here, on the overhanging rock outcrops, ancient artists had used the stone walls as their canvases and their graffiti revealed a Sahara which seemed unimaginable now. Elephants, giraffes and ostriches were etched into the rock. A wonderfully detailed anteater glowered down from one huge wall. Muhammad pointed to one engraving showing stick figures chasing a herd of cows. “These pictures are thought to be from 4500 BC”, he said. I marvelled at the age of this art and tried to imagine this arid land as the savannah it was when these artists began to scrape their drawings into the stone.

By the end of the second day my lips were splitting from the constant sand shower and my skin prickled with heat-rash. It was definitely time to try the cheche out for myself. We set up camp surrounded by a landscape plucked from a child’s nightmare. A Grimm’s Brother’s rock formation loomed above us on the cliff while church spire pinnacles cast monstrous shadows on the sand. Muhammad decided to make taguella for dinner. This simple bread made from millet flour, water and salt is the Tuareg’s main sustenance during desert travel. He placed the dough into the campfire ashes and then covered it with sand and hot embers. After twenty minutes he scraped the sand away for the dough to be turned over. Another twenty minutes and the bread was removed, the sand shaken off. It was dense and chewy and tasted of wood-smoke. A treat for me but if Muhammad was travelling in the desert by himself he’d eat little else. After dinner he teased me about my water consumption. I was glugging down a solid three litres every day. “One tea in the morning and maybe a cup of water when we get to camp at night”, Muhammad told me was all he drank.

The 4WD groaned and choked as we wound our way upwards along the narrow ridge into the Hoggar Mountains. In the distance, jagged canine-teeth peaks pierced the sky. We spluttered to a stop near the summit of Assekrem and I climbed the rough-cut steps to the top. In 1904, on this barren summit, the French priest Charles de Foucauld abandoned the world to live in hermitic solitude spending ten years studying Tuareg culture and their language Tamershak. The church he built and made his home is more a shack than a place of worship. A bitterly cold wind howled through the gaps in the window frames and tugged on my clothes.

I sat on a boulder and watched the sun throw a dusky-pink blanket over the craggy mountain tops, holding my jacket tight around me as the wind whipped across the stones. Muhammad came and sat next to me and grinned. We both had our cheches wrapped tightly around our heads. “Now you look like a Tuareg”. He said. But I knew that the soles of my feet were too pale and softly puffy and my blue eyes too weak and watery. Unlike me, the Tuareg have long adjusted to the desert. Their thirst and hunger sated by only a few cups of water and a bit of bread as they travel. Their foot soles thickened to not feel the burning heat of the sand and their clothing cocooning them from the worst of the sun and dust.

As it dipped, the sun set the surrounding peaks aglow and spread fingers of blood-red streaks across the sky. I could see the dark beauty in this landscape; shaped by violent upheaval in the belly of the earth and then carved out by the soft murmurings of the wind. As we walked down from the summit a slither of a crescent moon rose up from behind the peaks and the stars began to stud the darkening sky. This was a primeval land, I thought, where you would never belong fully, where you were constantly challenged by nature itself. I watched Muhammad spring down the steps despite the oncoming dark. Unless you were Tuareg of course; they had learnt the hard lessons of moulding their life around, rather than against, the desert. I rearranged my cheche closer across my face so it covered my nose against the chill. The simplicity of this strip of fabric summed up the Tuareg’s clever adaptation to the take-no-prisoners toughness of the Sahara. How they became masters of this brutal terrain.

I knew I was lost when I found myself surrounded by dozens of newly made coffins. They were piled against the walls: adult size, child size, baby size and all smelling of freshly sawn timber. Addis Ababa’s merkato is a huge sprawling city within a city; a market so vast that no one seems to be sure where it exactly begins or ends and I had been wandering around it for hours. I’d heard from a local that you could buy absolutely anything here and so for fun I thought I’d go shopping – for a Kalashnikov.

Finding what you want is a mammoth task in a market commonly thought to be the largest in Africa. There is street after street of endless – well – stuff. I found the street where old cardboard boxes come to die, the street where used ‘US AID’ containers and cans are resold as kitchen sieves and pans. There’s a timber street, tupperware street, belt street, tyre street and of course the coffin street where I finally realised I had no idea where I was. Wafts of spice and incense, leather and sawn wood mingled in the air as I watched an old man methodically sand a timber panel to fit on to a tiny coffin.

If there’s one place in the world where you could buy a gun along with your weekly groceries it would be here in the merkato. Its winding crowded alleyways are home to thousands of stalls selling everything from the mediocre, to the strange, to the downright bizarre. And in a nation which spent much of the last half of the 20th Century wracked by civil war, under the vice-like grip of a bloody dictatorship, a Kalashnikov stall doesn’t seem that weird. The trouble is finding it among the mishmash of the market roads.

The incoherent jumble of the market is a mirror of the city itself. From its humble beginnings as a tented settlement at the start of last century, Addis has grown and sprawled outwards in every direction becoming a massive shambles of a city. The main inner-city districts are connected by the uphill thoroughfare of Churchill Avenue where, at its southern base, the shoe-shine boys listlessly lounge awaiting customers. Earlier that day a long walk to the top of Churchill Avenue had brought me to Piazza; once the prestigious centre of Italian Addis Ababa and now a bustling hub which pulsates with the beat of a hundred sound systems all competing for prominence.

From a pavement table I had watched a gleaming NGO 4-wheel-drive sound its horn impatiently as a young boy herded a flock of goats across the street. I’d skirted the afro-headed hipsters selling fake-name sunglasses on the pavement, and hopped aboard one of the minibuses that buzz around the city’s spaghetti bowl of streets. That’s what had deposited me in the effervescent soul of the capital, the merkato, where all Addis’ inhabitants come to shop, to trade, to sell. Locals seem to know instinctively where everything is in this vast hive of commerce, but I’m not a local and the warren of alleyways had me beat.

I had asked every local I met for directions. Been pointed down side streets, drawn maps in the dust and taken by my wrist to the end of alleyways by helpful shopkeepers amused by this faranji attempting to search out the Kalashnikov stall. In a litter-strewn lane a man who looked like he’d walked out of a 1940s gangster movie – all sharp pinstripes and shiny pointed shoes – had given me vague directions that sent me deeper into the market’s depths. Outside a shack, held together with string and hope, a prune-faced grandmother had told me to turn left. I wandered around yet another corner and found myself caught up in a curtain of polka-dot patterned ties. The shopkeeper grinned as I clumsily untangled myself from his display. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly when I asked him directions so I continued to weave my way into the belly of the market; this maze of skinny streets and dead ends that seemed to go on forever.

Ethiopia remains one of the cheapest countries in the world in which to buy a Kalashnikov. It was the weapon of choice for the rebel-forces during the long and painful civil war that plunged the nation into chaos from the late 1970s to 1991. Today life continues to be cheap in Ethiopia and a Kalashnikov can sell for as little as £20. With on-going outbreaks of inter-tribal violence and a high incidence of banditry in rural regions of the country the popularity of this weapon continues unabated – if you can find one of course.

The old man finished sanding down the coffin and wiped his brow with a dirty rag. I wandered through an alley crammed with gaudy plastic flowers and wreaths where a tiny wrinkled Amhara woman, with an intricate cross tattooed on her forehead, smiled up at me as she added some dazzling pink carnations to a display. Old ladies bargained for bright plastic bowls as I passed by while a young man sorted through piles of rip-off football premiership t-shirts. Music blared from a beaten-up tape-player that perched precariously on a wall. I was hot, tired and thirsty and I still hadn’t found my gun.

I turned down yet another corner and found myself amid the mayhem of the main road. A minibus screeched to a halt in front of me and the driver beckoned me into his already crammed van. I paused, longingly looking back at the maze of streets. I’d found the fruit street, the herb street, the spice street and the tie street but the Kalashnikov street had evaded me completely. I sighed and squeezed myself into the mass of sweaty bodies already in the bus. It’s probably a blessing I never found it. I can’t imagine how I’d have explained that purchase to Customs.

Like this:

Walking in Beirut? This is a city where kamikaze drivers rule the roost and the so-called traffic police are more worried about checking out their own getup (think Erik Estrada-circa-CHiPs) than protecting pedestrians. Once you manage to actually get across the road navigation is still a nightmare due to entire blocks of the centre being cordoned off behind developer’s boards as the city’s facelift continues unabated. The soundtrack to a daytime stroll here is supplied by a crescendo of car horns and the staccato beat of construction drills. Who would ever think of running a walking tour – in Beirut – seriously?

I met Ronnie Chatah on a late Saturday afternoon, in the west Beirut suburb of Hamra, when the worst of the day’s sticky heat had been shrugged off the streets. “The Lebanese,” he cheerfully admitted, “don’t walk. This city though can be walked. Traffic is just a recent issue.” Never one to give up a chance to go where danger beckons I said a prayer to the gods of road safety everywhere and pulled on my sturdy walking sandals. Come on Beiruti taxi drivers. Knock me over if you dare.

Sightseeing has never played a big role in Beirut’s tourism promotion – a not surprising fact when you consider that most buildings regarded as ‘sights’ have been obliterated by years of war. Instead Beirut markets itself well as the partying playground of the Middle East; a place of bohemian cafes and ultra-cool nightlife. Modern, stylish and oh so up-to-the-minute, this is the Arab world at its most cosmopolitan and vibrant. Behind Beirut’s jazzed-up new high-rises and shiny glass office buildings though, there lies another whole side of the city that most tourists miss. “It’s so easy to walk by Martyr’s Square and the Holiday Inn and not know their stories,” said Ronnie. Even local tourists seem to misplace their memory.

This wilful amnesia, aided by the shiny veneer busily being slapped across their city’s ancient contours, is letting the Lebanese sweep away their capital’s cobwebs with a demolition ball. No one could blame them for wanting to. There are more skeletons hiding in the closet here than most. Street after street of bullet-scarred facades are a prominent reminder of the brutality of the civil war which ripped apart this city for 15 years, from 1975 to 1990. But as more and more of these buildings fall victim to property developers is the soul of Beirut being squandered along the way?

“Beirut is disappearing. Buildings that have served as landmarks, whole neighbourhoods have been bulldozed away,” Ronnie said as we stopped on the district’s main drag, Rue Hamra. I caught the scent of perfume and over-zealous hair-gel application from the promenading youngsters passing by. During the civil war, when this was the centre of Muslim Beirut, I’d have been as likely to encounter off-duty PLO fighters as strolling shoppers. Hidden away behind a row of new shop fronts is an abandoned cinema which stayed open throughout the war. This was where Yasser Arafat used to watch the latest Hollywood offerings in between skirmishes. The last movie to be played there, fittingly ‘Rambo 3’, (the ‘Rambo’ franchise being a particular favourite of the warring factions at the time, Ronnie told me) is still displayed in the disbanded projector wheel outside.

We threaded our way through Hamra, heading through the old Armenian district of Kantari, to reach the beginning of the infamous Green Line (the no-man’s land which marked the territorial split of the city during the war). On these back streets deserted mansions slumped and withered in a slow, genteel rot. Most were abandoned when their owners fled the fighting. The few that have been fixed-up look like ornate architectural preening birds of paradise – fine examples of the grand Neo-Ottoman style which once dominated the city. The gutted frame of the old Holiday Inn building presides over the skyline here despite now nestling between modern steel towers. Opened in 1974, it was one of the first buildings to be taken over by the militias with its rooms soon stripped of their opulent fittings and the glamorous guests replaced with gun-toting guerrillas. Like most Beirutis Ronnie remains ambivalent about this battle scarred relic’s future but recognises the role it serves as a sad reminder of the city’s past. “Fascinating buildings like the Holiday Inn are going to disappear soon and once it goes there’s a chunk of history that will go with it,” he said.

Crossing the Green Line during the war would have entailed some fancy footwork to dodge sniper fire. The guns may be gone but the hurtling traffic on Rue Abdel Kader still requires a need for speed and agility. When Ronnie first designed this tour establishing a pedestrian-friendly route was his first hurdle. He admitted they haven’t been completely successful and the tour still criss-crosses a couple of main streets. Still, it’s all part of the Beirut experience and I stepped out onto the road determined not to look like a foolish tourist. Amid the speed and swerve of the cars, the fug of petrol-haze, and the extra annoyance of several curb crawling taxis which decided to try and offer me a ride, I managed, somehow, to make it to the other side without an ambulance having to be called and found myself in the construction ghost town of Wadi Abu Jamil which marks the western tip of the old Downtown.

The central city is surely Beirut’s weirdest district. Completely levelled after becoming the front line during the war, much of the city makeover has been concentrated here. The redevelopment was the brainchild of the late Rafiq Hariri, twice prime minister of Lebanon, who was murdered on 14 February 2005. Although the real-estate company, Solidere (which was created solely to carry out this work) has been steadily mixing concrete and ploughing dollars into the project for 17 years, much of the old Downtown still has a film-set quality. As if the stage has been set up but the actors have yet to arrive. A lot of this seems due to most of the rebuilding being commercial rather than residential in the government’s hope that Beirut will become the next Dubai; a wish which has yet to be granted. I passed endless shells of empty, sparkling buildings, the padding of my feet echoing off the pristine pavement.

The buildings in Wadi Abu Jamil (the old Jewish quarter) have been finished for five years, Ronnie told me. But because speculative investors keep trading, and property prices keep going up, the buildings remain vacant as there’s no need to rent. The only other people we met were bored looking policemen stationed here due to the presidential palace being down the road. An unexpected sight is the perfectly restored Maghen Abraham synagogue. Beirut once boasted 17 synagogues and a vibrant Jewish community. The city’s Jews upped sticks and left during the war (most heading to Montreal and Geneva rather than Israel) and not long after, the synagogue became yet another architectural victim of the conflict. In 1982 PLO arms dealers in the city used it as an ammunition store believing that Israel wouldn’t dare target it. They did, destroying it completely. When the owners agreed to sell their empty properties to Solidere one of the conditions placed on the sale was that the synagogue be rebuilt. Now it stands as a lonely and unused reminder of one of the city’s many lost communities.

The streets radiating out from Place d’Etoile, the core of old downtown Beirut, have benefited from painstaking stone-by-stone restoration work. Yes it’s impressive but as we wandered through, it felt more like a historic theme-park than a lived-in city. I took a quick peek into the Solidere office where a scale map of the ambitious master-plan for the city is on display. The entire project isn’t set to be finished for another 30 years. Just beyond, Ronnie showed me the memorial to the journalist Samir Kassir. Assassinated in 2005 (it wasn’t a good year for public figures in Lebanon), Kassir was known for his long running war of words with Solidere; accusing them of the reckless erasing of Beirut’s history. ‘Beirut, outward in its wealth,’ Kassir once said, ‘the city that is also outward in its ruins.’ Ronnie told me that Kassir’s writings played a large role in inspiring him to begin these walks. “In Lebanon there’s a lot of conspiracy fetish and myth. Samir Kassir was one of the few journalists who tried to search out the truth. He opened up debates and questioned our collective amnesia and was an inspirational figure when it comes to Beirut’s past.”

The groan and clang of construction cranes in a nearby boarded up development area greeted my arrival at Martyr’s Square. Once the beating heart of Beirut it is little more than a sprawling, neglected patch of gravel today. Marooned within this wasteland is the city’s most famous landmark. Pockmarked from sniper bullets, the Liberty Statue is now dwarfed by the colossal new Muhammad Al-Aminne Mosque across the road. Although little more than an ad hoc car-park (the square’s rejuvenation is part of the last stage of Solidere’s plan) its importance as the symbolic meeting point of their city in the hearts and minds of Beirutis is safe. It was here, on the 14th of March 2005, that over one million Lebanese (about one third of the population) chose to converge to demonstrate over Rafiq Hariri’s assassination and demand full Syrian withdrawal from their nation.

Dusk was beginning to fall. The slowly fading light an apt companion as we crossed into the spooky dereliction of what was known as ‘deep trench’ or ‘sniper’s alley’ during the war. At the heart of the city’s brutal urban warfare, this ill-fated Bachoura street block formed a frontline where only a couple of metres separated the various Christian militias from the Muslim factions. The yellow light of a street lamp exposed the raw wounds of the buildings around me. Scabs of brickwork oozed plaster, scarred walls revealed glimpses of blackened innards. The whole place dripped a horror movie creepiness which set the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

Rumbles of ricocheting gunfire may have been blasting over the centre during the war but the residents of East and West Beirut never stopped partying. The music at the clubs was just turned up a bit louder to tune out the noise. We crossed a road and arrived in East Beirut’s Monot district; a world-apart from the gloom and tattered dying buildings not more than a few steps away. This is the Beirut of the tourist brochures, known for its cafe culture and nightlife scene. Ronnie’s walk delves below this superficial modern surface to unearth the stories beneath. “It’s about bringing the city to life, making people laugh and taking them on a roller coaster of emotions,” he said. Despite the traffic, the constant construction, and the bland high-rise facade, you can walk in Beirut. And you might just find a hidden narrative to this city which lies beyond the bottom of your cappuccino cup.